A South Coast Splash!
SUSAN DESROSIERS speaks to an exciting new Sussex film director
At your next quiz night, if you were asked who was the first woman to swim the English Channel, you might suggest it was the American, Gertrude Ederle in 1926. And you’d be right. But who was the first English woman to swim the English Channel? The answer is Mercedes Gleitze, from Brighton. She swam the channel in 15 hours and 15 minutes on 7 October, 1927. So why has virtually no-one today heard of her?
When ambitious young director, Elliott Hasler, also from Brighton, heard about Mercedes’ achievements, he decided to bring her inspiring story to life on the big screen. Vindication Swim, on general release from 8 March, and showing at the Electric Palace on 29 March, is the story of how this young woman, daughter of economic migrants, found a passion and talent for endurance swimming and became an international celebrity.
THE ROLEX GIRL
In the 1920s, when women were expected to marry and stay at home with the children, Mercedes not only successfully swam the channel (wearing a waterproof watch which made her a poster girl for Rolex), but later became the first ever person to swim the Straits of Gibraltar.
But controversy arose involving a competitor and Mercedes’ swimming times, and this is a large feature of Hasler’s film. Filmed entirely on the coast between Brighton and Dover and in the cinque port of Rye, it stars Kirsten Callaghan as Mercedes and John Locke as her coach, with a score by Emmy winner Daniel Clive McCallum. When I spoke to Hasler, I asked how such a challenging production came about.
“It’s been a long time coming. We started filming in August 2019. Covid pushed it back about a year, bang in the middle of the production. Because it’s filmed in the channel, everything is real. There’s no tanks, no body doubles, no green screens. Everything is genuine and authentic, so that posed a lot of challenges in terms of logistics.”
I asked how Kirsten coped with the cold water of the channel. “She did all the swimming, so we could only put her in the water during the months it was safe. It gave us a window of about four months in the summer when we could shoot. It was three consecutive summers out on the water shooting.”
A TEENAGE SPIELBERG?
Hasler has been making films since the age of ten with friends and family (he tells me of childhood premieres complete with red carpet), and when he was 14 he made a feature film about his great-grandfather’s experience in the Second World War. It took three years to make and was picked up, to his surprise, for a US and UK release. The success of WWII: The Long Road Home drove him to continue his film-making and partially funded the making of Vindication Swim.
Director Elliott Hasler in the English Channel
One can’t help making comparisons to the director Steven Spielberg when talking to Hasler, and he admits that the movie Jaws has been a terrific influence. Thankfully though, sharks were not one of the challenges in the making of this film.
Vindication Swim shows at the Electric Palace Cinema, High Street, Hastings on Friday 29 March at 7.30pm.
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